Stephen Spender

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Sir Stephen Harold Spender (28 February 1909 – 16 July 1995) was an English poet, novelist, and essayist who concentrated on issues of class conflict and class struggle in his writing.

In 1965, he was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the United States Library of Congress.

Early life

Spender was born in Kensington, London, to writer Harold Spender and Violet Hilda Schuster, a painter and poet of German Jewish descent. He went to Hall School in Hampstead first, then to Gresham's School, Holt, and later Charlecote School in Worthing, but he was dissatisfied. He was taken to University College School (Hampstead), which he later described as "the softest of schools" after his mother's death. Spender left for Nantes and Lausanne and then hopped to University College Oxford (much later, he was named an honorary fellow). Throughout his life, Spender said he never passed any examination. W. H. Auden, who introduced him to Christopher Isherwood, was possibly his closest friend and the man with the most influence on him. The first version of Auden's Poems was handprinted by the spender. He left Oxford without obtaining a degree and moved to Hamburg in 1929. Isherwood invited him to Berlin. Every six months, Spender returns to England.

Louis MacNeice, Edward Upward, and Cecil Day-Lewis were among Auden Group members. He was friendly with David Jones and later became aware of William Butler Yeats, Allen Ginsberg, Ted Hughes, Joseph Brodsky, Isaiah Berlin, Mary McCarthy, Roy Campbell, Jeffrey Abbott, Raymond Shannon, Colin Wilson, F. T. Prince and T. Eliot, as well as Bloomsbury Group members, especially Virginia Woolf.

Personal life

Spender fell in love with Tony Hyndman in 1933, and they lived together from 1935 to 1936. Spender had an affair with Muriel Gardiner in 1934. "I find boys much more attractive, in fact, I am much more vulnerable," he wrote in a letter to Christopher Isherwood in September 1934, but I find the actual sexual activity with women more satisfying, more disgusting, and, in fact, more interesting." Spender fell in love with and married Inez Pearn in December 1936, just after the conclusion of his marriage with Hyndman. In 1939, the marriage took place. Spender married Natasha Litvin, a concert pianist, in 1941. The marriage lasted until his death. Elizabeth "Lizzie" Spender, the family's former actor, and their son, Matthew Spender, are married to the daughter of Armenian artist Arshile Gorky.

The sexuality of a spender has long been debated. Spenders' seemingly changing attitudes have led him to be labeled bisexual, repressed, latently homophobic, or simply something that refuses to be described in a clear manner. Many of his former classmates were gay. In his earlier years, Spender had several affairs with men, chiefly with Hyndman, who was referred to as "Jimmy Younger" in his book World Within World. He changed his attention toward heterosexuality after his affair with Muriel Gardiner, but his friendship with Hyndman complicated both his marriage and his brief marriage to Inez Pearn. Natasha Litvin's marriage in 1941 seemed to have brought an end to his professional relationships with men, but not necessarily to the end of all homosexual activity, as his unexpurgated diaries indicated. In later versions of his poetry, he toned down homosexual allusions. In a republished version, the following line was reprinted: "Whatever happens, I will never be alone." "I will never be alone," says the boy, a train fare, or a revolution." "I will never have an affair, a train fare, or a revolution." Nevertheless, he was a founding member of the Homosexual Law Reform Society, which called for the removal of British sodomy laws. Spender suing author David Leavitt for reportedly using his friendship with "Jimmy Younger" in Leavitt's "While England Sleeps in 1994. With Leavitt deleting certain portions from his text, the litigation was settled out of court.

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Career

Spender began work on a novel in 1929, which was not published until 1988, under the title The Temple. The novel is about a young man who travels to Germany and finds a culture at once more open than England's, particularly about relationships between men, and shows frightening harbingers of Nazism that are confusingly related to the very openness the man admires. Spender wrote in his 1988 introduction:

Spender was discovered by T. S. Eliot, an editor at Faber and Faber, in 1933.

His early poetry, notably Poems (1933), was often inspired by social protest. Living in Vienna, he further expressed his convictions in Forward from Liberalism; in Vienna (1934), a long poem in praise of the 1934 uprising of Austrian socialists; and in Trial of a Judge (1938), an antifascist drama in verse.

At the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, which published the first edition of James Joyce's Ulysses, historic figures made rare appearances to read their work: Paul Valéry, André Gide and Eliot. Hemingway even broke his rule of not reading in public if Spender would read with him. Since Spender agreed, Hemingway appeared for a rare reading in public with him.

In 1936, Spender became a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Harry Pollitt, its head, invited him to write for the Daily Worker on the Moscow Trials. In late 1936, Spender married Inez Pearn, whom he had recently met at an Aid to Spain meeting. She is described as 'small and rather ironic' and 'strikingly good-looking'. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, the Daily Worker sent him to Spain on a mission to observe and report on the Soviet ship Komsomol, which had sunk while carrying Soviet weapons to the Second Spanish Republic. Spender travelled to Tangier and tried to enter Spain via Cadiz, but was sent back. He then travelled to Valencia, where he met Hemingway and Manuel Altolaguirre. (Tony Hyndman, alias Jimmy Younger, had joined the International Brigades, which were fighting against Francisco Franco's forces in the Battle of Guadalajara.) In July 1937 he attended the Second International Writers' Congress, the purpose of which was to discuss the attitude of intellectuals to the war, held in Valencia, Barcelona and Madrid and attended by many writers, including Hemingway, André Malraux, and Pablo Neruda. Pollitt told Spender "to go and get killed; we need a Byron in the movement". Spender was imprisoned for a while in Albacete. In Madrid, he met Malraux; they discussed Gide's Retour de l'U.R.S.S.. Because of medical problems, he went back to England and bought a house in Lavenham. In 1939, he divorced.

His 1938 translations of works by Bertolt Brecht and Miguel Hernández appeared in John Lehmann's New Writing.

He felt close to the Jewish people; his mother, Violet Hilda Schuster, was half-Jewish (her father's family were German Jews who converted to Christianity, and her mother came from an upper-class family of Catholic German, Lutheran Danish and distant Italian descent). Spender's second wife, Natasha, whom he married in 1941, was also Jewish. In 1942, he joined the fire brigade of Cricklewood and Maresfield Gardens as a volunteer. Spender met several times with the poet Edwin Muir.

After he was no longer left-wing, he was one of those who wrote of their disillusionment with communism in the essay collection The God that Failed (1949), along with Arthur Koestler and others. It is thought that one of the big areas of disappointment was the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact between Germany and the Soviet Union, which many leftists saw as a betrayal. Like Auden, Isherwood and several other outspoken opponents of fascism in the 1930s, Spender did not see active military service in World War II. He was initially graded "C" upon examination because of his earlier colitis, poor eyesight, varicose veins and the long-term effects of a tapeworm in 1934. But he pulled strings to be re-examined and was upgraded to "B", which meant that he could serve in the London Auxiliary Fire Service. Spender spent the winter of 1940 teaching at Blundell's School, taking a position that had been vacated by Manning Clark, who returned to Australia as a consequence of the war to teach at Geelong Grammar.

After the war, Spender was a member of the Allied Control Commission, restoring civil authority in Germany.

With Cyril Connolly and Peter Watson, Spender co-founded Horizon magazine and served as its editor from 1939 to 1941. From 1947 to 1949, he went to the US several times and saw Auden and Isherwood. He was the editor of Encounter magazine from 1953 to 1966 but resigned after it emerged that the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which published it, was covertly funded by the CIA. Spender insisted that he was unaware of the ultimate source of the magazine's funds. He taught at various American institutions and accepted the Elliston Chair of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati in 1954. In 1961, he became professor of rhetoric at Gresham College, London.

Spender helped found the magazine Index on Censorship, was involved in the founding of the Poetry Book Society and did work for UNESCO. He was appointed the 17th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1965. During the late 1960s, Spender frequently visited the University of Connecticut, which he declared had the "most congenial teaching faculty" he had encountered in the United States.

Spender was Professor of English at University College London from 1970 to 1977 and then became Professor Emeritus. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) at the 1962 Queen's Birthday Honours, and knighted in the 1983 Queen's Birthday Honours. At a ceremony commemorating the 40th anniversary of the Normandy Invasion on 6 June 1984, US President Ronald Reagan quoted from Spender's poem "The Truly Great" in his remarks:

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